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New library acquisitions: Spring 2023

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New acquisitions in the library this month include publications about the many female sculptors who worked in, or visited, Auguste Rodin’s Paris studio at the turn of the 19th century.

These overlooked artists are highlighted by the current exhibition Rebecca Fortnum: Les Praticiennes, which stems from Rebecca’s Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute in 2021-22.

The library is adding any information available about the sculptors uncovered by Rebecca to the collections. These include artists such as Enid Yandell (1869-94), who created public monuments and portrait busts in the United States and Europe from the 1890s; and the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose work in sculpture is less well known. Further titles will be added in the coming months.

Rebecca’s earlier writings and drawings reflecting on gender, creativity and the gaze can be found in A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, produced during her fellowship at Merton College, Oxford in 2019 and Self-Contained published in Sheffield by Research Group for Artists’ Publications, 2013.

The recent exhibition The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture has sparked acquisitions on the theme of the black female subject in art, including the Impossible Purities : Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture by Jennifer DeVere Brody, which informed the thinking behind the exhibition.

This month we received several books on British artist Laurence Josephs, who is represented in the Leeds Sculpture Collection and Archive of Sculptors’ Papers. Josephs studied at Leon Underwood’s school, ‘Brook Green’ in the 1930s along with Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Gertrude Hermes and Blair-Hughes Stanton amongst others and contributed engravings and poetry to The Island, a quarterly magazine, available in the library. Very little has been published on Josephs so we are delighted to receive this new information from Anisoptera Publications.

See Laurence Josephs’ sculpture The Dreamer on Art UK.

Full list of acquisitions

January

January

February

February

March

March

Find out more about the exhibitions

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Rebecca Fortnum: Les Praticiennes

3 February – 4 June 2023
Gallery 4

This display of paintings and drawings by artist Rebecca Fortnum emerges from her ongoing interest in the women surrounding the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) in turn-of-the-century Paris.

The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture

The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture

25 November 2022 – 26 February 2023
Main galleries

The Colour of Anxiety examines objects that introduced colour and new materials into the sculptural process, situating them within the context of the anxiety which often weighed upon Victorian society in the face of social change and scientific advances.

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The Henry Moore Institute is currently closed for refurbishment until summer 2024.

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